“There is one way of finding out if that’s what happened…” Barigazzi was sitting sideways on the seat, his arm against the back of the chair in a theatrical pose which seemed in keeping with the music.
Soneri, respecting the pause, raised his bowl to his lips and drank a deep draft of the Fortanina. It was like a young wine, halfway between a fresh must and the heavy, black Lambrusco from the lands around the Po.
“You’d have to find out if he’s still on the dinghy.”
“The dinghy?”
“Something like that,” Barigazzi said. “It’s something you need when you have to get ashore and the mooring is out of reach. Maybe because of a sandbank or shallows.”
The dinghy. Soneri looked at his watch with the idea of contacting the carabinieri in Luzzara, but then he thought it might be more fruitful to go there in person and perhaps even get on board. Meantime, the music had changed. “Aida” echoed off the walls of the osteria, tripping along the beams of the ceiling and bouncing back into the ears of the listeners. The wall facing the commissario was bare brick, the plain, red brick prevalent in the lower Po valley, while the other walls were partially covered with plaster. In a low corner, near the bar, there was a gauge with a series of notches indicating the dates of various floods. The highest was ’51.
“An insult, so much water in a drinking den like this,” Soneri said to Barigazzi.
“We put up with it occasionally, but give it half a chance and it’d be all over us.”
“We’ve taken more water in through our ears swimming in the Po than through our mouths drinking the stuff,” Vernizzi said. “Like the owner of this place, who can’t hear a thing now.”
“There’s some people I could mention that have taken in water through the holes in their arses,” Ghezzi sniggered.
The commissario smiled while his eyes continued to run over the walls where various Falstaffs and Othellos stood out against a background of heavy clay streaked with white lime, the colours of a good Felino salame. His eyes fell on a life-size, medium-quality fresco of a Christ executed by some mad artist. The face seemed to express not so much pain as the anger of a man cursing and swearing, while his sturdy, oarsman’s arms seemed capable of tearing the nails from the cross. When the commissario looked lower, he saw that the artist had painted the legs folded over, crossed slightly beneath the pelvis.
“You’ve noticed it too,” Barigazzi said sarcastically. “Jesus Christ did not die of cold feet.”
Guffaws rang out around the table and created ripples in the Fortanina in the bowls.
“It wasn’t always like that,” he said, turning more serious. “It happened in ’51, with the flood.”
The commissario looked around all the tables. The chances were that not one of them was a church- goer.
“You don’t hold back with your jokes,” he said.
“It’s not a joke,” Torelli protested. “Even the priest agrees, and he made the old women believe it was a miracle.”
“The thing is he might be right.”
Soneri shook his head to say it was time to stop. He felt himself trapped in the middle. He had come to pose questions, and now he found himself in a bizarre situation. The wine was inducing a mood of euphoria in him, while the talk spun round him like a gauze bandage immobilizing him layer by layer.
“I don’t believe in miracles,” Barigazzi said, turning serious. “But nobody can say who redid Christ’s legs, not even the bar owner himself. He found them like that when he got back to his osteria after the flood water receded. They say it was some street artist who did the painting standing up to his knees in water.”
Soneri looked back at the Christ. He looked like an Indian holy man, but there was nothing blasphemous or mocking about him. “It’s strange to see an image like that here, where no-one goes to church,” he almost said.
“We don’t go to church and we can’t stand priests, but he,” Barigazzi said, pointing at the painting with deep respect, “he was a man who underwent suffering, like us.”
“He taught us not to kill,” Soneri said.
The three, suddenly suspicious, looked up for a moment and stared at him: “You don’t really think that we…”
“No, I don’t. But they did kill Tonna’s brother.”
“Decimo?”
“Yes.”
The conversation halted and even the music paused. The din of the osteria took over. None of the four asked any questions. Their mood was now serious and only Vernizzi murmured, “That’s certainly strange,” and he seemed to be speaking for the others.
There was a silence for a few minutes, which Soneri passed listening to the somewhat acerbic Verdi of “I Lombardi alla prima Crociata” before Barigazzi found the courage to venture: “So in your view, Anteo too was…”
The commissario first stretched out his arms then moved his face closer to Barigazzi’s square, high- cheekboned face. He was not wearing a beret, and this showed off his still thick but whitening hair. “I’m not sure, but as we set aside other hypotheses, I’m almost beginning to grow convinced.”
The other drew back and seemed lost in thought. From the expression on his face, the commissario deduced that he had been very convincing.
“Until this moment, I had been under the impression that the current could have carried the barge downstream and through the arches of a bridge, but you’ve undermined this conviction and with it any real possibility that we’re dealing with an accident. You have simplified the hypotheses, but complicated the story.”
Vernizzi and Torelli nodded in the style of a priest hearing confession.
“So then,” Soneri started up again, “There must have been someone on the barge. Someone who knew what he was doing, who knew the river well enough to be able to navigate at night-time, in the dark, using only the tiller. Someone who started off from the boat club, casting off the moorings, giving the impression that the rising water of the Po had made the barge break free, or else that Tonna himself had decided to sail without engine or lights. After all, that was strange, was it not? But to make this last hypothesis credible, there needs to be some indication that there was a boatman on board.”
“The light,” Barigazzi said. “The light on the barge was switched on a couple of times while it was on the river.”
Soneri smiled at this confirmation, while the music rose in a crescendo at a crucial point in the opera, even if he couldn’t recall exactly which. It was the first supposition which stood up, but it was followed immediately by the realization that it was worthless, no more than a straightforward deduction from facts which he had not yet sifted.
Barigazzi looked at him. “Commissario, do you see the Po? The river is always smooth and placid, but deep down it’s turbulent. No-one ever thinks about life down there, fish struggling for survival in an unending duel in the murky depths. And everything is endlessly changing, according to the whim of the water. None of us can imagine those depths unless and until we end up scraping against them. Dredging is always provisional work. Like everything in this world, wouldn’t you say?”
4
Angela kept him awake during the return journey to the city, twenty minutes winding through the mist which followed the rain, her voice cutting into his brain and setting off electric shocks each time the Fortanina threatened to carry out its digestive and somniferous duties. He had failed to call her at the agreed hour and this had been taken as a sign of indifference. She was not as yet entirely accustomed to his lapses of memory, and if she were, he would have viewed that as a matter for concern. When he came off the telephone, he tried to call Juvara, but had insufficient battery on his mobile, as he was advised by a slightly mocking, double bleep. He tossed the implement on to the seat beside him, but before he had time to get worked up about it, he was turning into his own driveway.
He collapsed into the armchair in the living room, lit a cigar and surveyed the apartment. This was his favourite moment of the day: slippers, pyjamas, dressing gown and his own home, always the same. The house
